One of the main battles of the Enlightenment was the fight to separate the church from the state. After centuries of inquisitions and religious wars, people had grown sick and tired of the church and the state conspiring together to create empires. The churches were the newsrooms of the Middle Ages, and these ministries of propaganda were responsible for creating the culture that everyone was forced to conform to. Whenever the people would experience the wrath of the state through war, taxation and legislation, the teachings of the church would be used as moral justifications for these transgressions. This is the primary reason why the church was singled out as the source of the corruption, when in reality it was only one part of a multifaceted problem that cuts deep into our psychology.

When the indignant masses finally managed to separate the church from the state, the size of both shrank temporarily. Without the ability to threaten people with force, the church eventually became marginalized because they failed to win the people over with the substance of their teachings or the value of their organization as a whole. Likewise, without the moral justification of the church to back them up, the state was put in a position where it had to come up with new ways to explain why it was fit to rule over others. The divine right of kings was no longer accepted as a reasonable claim to take ownership over another person; this was actually one of the primary reasons why the church had become so controversial at the time.

Although there was a relative advancement of freedom as a result of this change, the relationship between the state and the general population improved very little. People were still conscripted into unpopular wars of conquest. They were still taxed considerably and were still forced to obey laws that they never agreed to. Only now different justifications were developed to keep everyone in line with the status quo and obedient to authority. Government-funded intellectuals worked all throughout the Enlightenment to create these new justifications for state power.